Crime-fighting robot taken off its beat after launching alleged 'war on the homeless'

Like so many classic Western anti-heroes before him, he rolled (literally) into town with a singular goal in mind: cleaning up the streets, which had become a gritty hotbed of harassment, vandalism, break-ins and grift. The only difference was that he was a slow-moving, 400-pound robot with a penchant for snapping hundreds of photos a minute without people's permission, and this was San Francisco's Mission District in 2017. Quite a bit, as it turns out. In the last month, his first on the job, "K-9″ -- a 5-foot-tall, 3-foot-wide K5 Autonomous Data Machine that can be rented for $6 an hour from Silicon Valley start-up Knightscope -- was battered with barbecue sauce, allegedly smeared with feces, covered by a tarp and nearly toppled by an attacker. As if those incidents weren't bad enough, K-9 was also accused of discriminating against homeless people who had taken up refuge on the sidewalks he was assigned to patrol. It was those troubling allegations, which went viral this week, that sparked public outrage and prompted K-9's employers -- the San Francisco chapter of the animal rescue group SPCA -- to pull the plug on their newly minted robot security pilot program. "Effective immediately, the San Francisco SPCA has suspended its security robot pilot program," Jennifer Scarlett, the organization's president, wrote in a statement emailed to the Washington Post on Thursday. "We piloted the robot program in an effort to improve the security around our campus and to create a safe atmosphere for staff, volunteers, clients and animals.